Jill DuffyComindware ProjectComindware Project is a solid project management service. It doesn't have every feature your team might desire, but if it has everything you need, it's a good option at a competitive price.

Doesn't support many third-party apps and services. No included chat. No built-in timer. Checkboxes should be easier to find.

Bottom Line

Comindware Project is a solid project management service. It doesn't have every feature your team might desire, but if it has everything you need, it's a good option at a competitive price.

The job of a project manager is to juggle resources, such as time, people, and money. With the right project management tool, however, every team member can have more insight into what used to be the project manager's sole prerogative. And the project manager can see relevant information more clearly. Comindware Project, which costs $9.99 per user per month, helps teams of any size manage an unlimited number of projects in an interface that's simple and clear. It has all the tools you'd expect for managing projects, as well as Rooms where team members can discuss more tangentially related ideas. You can integrate it with Outlook and Microsoft Project easily, but other integrations require custom setup using Comindware's available APIs. Comindware Project dropped its prices significantly in the last year to make it a more competitive option. It doesn't have every feature under the sun, but it's a capable program.

The three project management platforms that scored highest in our testing and earned PCMag's Editors' Choice are Zoho Projects, Teamwork Projects, and LiquidPlanner. Zoho Projects and Teamwork Projects pack more value than Comindware, especially for small companies. LiquidPlanner is our recommended application for larger organizations that are looking for a project management tool that will not just help them manage resources, but also change the way they run their businesses.

Price and Plans Comindware Project offers a 30-day free trial, but it doesn't offer a truly free account. The company keeps it simple with only two options. You can let Comindware host your account in the cloud, or you can host it on your own servers. Either way, the price is the same, at $9.99 per user per month or $99.99 per user if you pay for a year upfront. With other project management services, you usually have to choose from among several different tiers of service that all have different feature sets and prices. Comindware has the simplest options I've ever seen.

If you choose the cloud-hosted version of Comindware Project, you also get some storage space. The amount depends on the number of users:

10-24 users: 500MB per user

25-49 users: 400MB per user

50-99 users: 350MB peruser

100-249 users: 325MB per user.

A team of 10, for example, would get 5GB of storage.

The per-user-per-month fee structure is often an indicator that a program is better suited for larger organizations than small ones. Other services with a similar pricing structure include LiquidPlanner (from $29 per user per month), Clarizen (from $45 per user per month), and the enterprise-focused Workfront (about $30 per user per month, depending on setup). Comindware's price seems pretty attractive by comparison.

There is one service with a per-user-per-month fee structure that is lower than Comindware Project, and that's Volerro. Volerro offers a free account that you can try for an unlimited amount of time, as well as an in-app chat box.

Some project management platforms charge a flat monthly rate for an unlimited number users, instead. These include Zoho Projects ($50 per month for a reasonably comparable plan) and Teamwork Projects ($49 per month for a comparable plan). For small teams, these options are probably much more attractive. At those prices, Zoho lets you manage 50 projects and Teamwork offers 40. Comindware Project, however, doesn't put a cap on the number of projects you can manage.

Free alternatives for project management do exist, but they typically come with limitations. Teamwork Projects offers a free account, but it only supports two projects. Zoho Projects and ProofHub both offer free accounts, but they only support one project each. The well-known project management platform Basecamp gives verified teachers a free account, as well as anyone with a Basecamp Classic account dating from before though its base rate for anyone signing up now is $29 per month.

Features and Interface Comindware Project has a clean and almost calm interface. It isn't overly busy, which I appreciate. When you first start using the tool, you see some Getting Started content displayed prominently and labeled clearly. These are walk-throughs of how to use the tool. Pop-ups tell you to, say, create a new project and add a task. They only take a few minutes to complete.

If you jump right in, you notice a vertical menu on the left with primary tabs for My Work, Projects, Rooms, People, Timesheets, and Settings. A button at the top collapses that left rail to have an even tidier work area. Secondary menu options along the top change depending on your primary tab selection. For example, when you're in the Projects tab, you see the top options for Activity, Tasks, WBS (work breakdown structure), Reports, and Documents. If you switch to the My Work view, you see Activity, Tasks, and Documents.

Standard project management features are reasonably well executed. As you create tasks, you can add detail to them, such as an assignee, deadline, estimated amount of time to complete the task, dependencies, and so forth. You can delay a task until a certain date. Although prefab templates aren't included, you can create your own by copying an existing project and turning it into one. The only simple project management feature that wasn't immediately apparent to me was how to add a milestone, and after looking through some help files, I'm still not clear on it. It seems better to make a parent task the milestone and assign other tasks as subtasks to it.

While you can assign one person to a task, you can't assign multiple people, the way you can in LiquidPlanner. Other people can become followers on a task, however, which is similar to how Asana works. You also can't assign a task to be completed by a specific time, only a specific date, which doesn't help teams that work on very tight and frequent deadlines. If you want someone to turn in work by 4:00 p.m., you'll have to have a more informal rule to perhaps add it to the task notes or descriptions.

The system does have some advanced features, though. For example, a priority-based planning solution means tasks can be rescheduled for you based on task priorities and resource assignments. If one task changes and it will affect other tasks, the tasks are automatically updated accordingly. For example, if one person misses a deadline and there are dependent tasks, all the tasks will be rescheduled by the appropriate amount of time to adjust for the . That's the kind of functionality at which LiquidPlanner also excels. But LiquidPlanner goes deeper with automated scheduling. It can also handle vacation requests so that when one team member requests time off (right in LiquidPlanner) and it's approved (also right in the system), work assigned to the person that would be affected by the time off gets flagged for reassignment.

A few smart choices in interaction design in Comindware Project are subtle and easy to overlook, but very useful. For example, as you jump from project to project, the system remembers what view or tab you previously had open for that project, so that you can return to where you left off. Other project management applications typically send you to a default page for each project instead of remembering the most recently opened view.

Although the interface is clean and easy to navigate, it did take me a little time to figure out how to interact with tasks once they were created. Checkboxes aren't omnipresent on tasks, the way they are in, say, ProofHub or Asana. When you're ready to check off a task you've completed in Comindware Project, you have to hover over the task until an 'i' button appears. When you click it, all the task information shows up on the right, all in the same window as before. You then have to look up top for a button that says Complete and click it to mark the task as done. See the images above and below. Once you figure it out, it's not difficult to do, but it's less efficient than having a checkbox right from the task list view.

My favorite feature in Comindware Project is the work breakdown structure (WBS) page. WBS is a system for breaking down work into discrete, deliverable components that are then mapped into a hierarchical tree structure. Most other project management tools don't offer this kind of view, but it could be ideal for people who enjoy mind mapping because it's highly visual. Each project has a WBS page that shows all the tasks in a project in a visual map. I found it much easier to understand the relationships between tasks—such as which tasks depended on other tasks being completed first—from this view than from a task list view. Even better, you can restructure the project by dragging and dropping the tasks to their correct locations. My only beef with the WBS page is that it's not crisp looking. The type is blurry, and you can't adjust the size on the font.

Comindware Project includes Timesheets on which you can record how long you spend on each task, but it does not include a timer to keep an eye on the exact number of minutes you've been working. Competitor LiquidPlanner has a built-in timer that auto-populates timesheets when used, which helps for work that's billed by the hour.

While you can discuss projects and tasks by adding comments to them and starting tangential conversations in their own Rooms, there is no live chat app in Comindware Project. Zoho Projects gives you both text and live video chat, which can really help to foster communication in teams. Clarizen, Volerro, and ProofHub each include standard chat boxes. Teamwork Projects offers a separate desktop app for for free, but it's not in the same window as the workspace, the way it is in Zoho Projects.

Actually, there is an in-app chat box, but it's for technical support. I tried it, and a technician replied within a few minutes, but it's impossible to make the box disappear once you've opened it. You can minimize it, but you can't make it disappear. I even tried logging out and logging back in, and I still couldn't shake it.

If your team already has a team chat app, such as Slack or HipChat, you can integrate it with Comindware Project, but only if you use APIs. There isn't a simple way to connect them, however, if you're not a programmer.

Apps and Integrations Comindware Project has mobile apps for Android and iOS, which can help teams stay connected during travel or when some team members spend time in the field.

As far as integration with other apps goes, Comindware Project isn't especially strong. You can connect it to Outlook and Microsoft as mentioned, but you can't connect to other business apps commonly used in project management, such as Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox. Again, there are APIs for custom integrations, but there aren't any plug-and-play options built into Comindware Project.

Zoho Projects, Teamwork Projects, and LiquidPlanner all offer direct integration with those three cloud storage services I just mentioned, and LiquidPlanner can connect to Salesforce if needed. More and more project management applications are opening up their APIs to Zapier, a third-party tool that facilitates integrations between services for people who aren't coders. Comindware Project isn't available on Zapier as of this writing.

Solid and Serviceable Comindware Project is a solid and reliable project management service. It doesn't excel in support for third-party services or extra features, like in-app chat or a timer for auto-populating timesheets. But it has a good interface, and the WBS feature is a nice touch for visually oriented people. At $9.99 per user per month, it is on the lower side of the price range among project management services that charge per user. It doesn't edge out Editors' Choices Zoho Projects or Teamwork Projects for small businesses, or LiquidPlanner for larger organizations looking to change how they operate. But it is a fine choice if it meets your organization's productivity needs.

Comindware Project

Bottom Line: Comindware Project is a solid project management service. It doesn't have every feature your team might desire, but if it has everything you need, it's a good option at a competitive price.

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About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma... See Full Bio

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Comindware Project

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